Transcription
You've probably heard bits of writing advice from Hemingway over the years, but most writers haven't heard what I'm going to tell you in this video. To put together these nine surprising steps, I read every interview, and every collected letter, and every non-fiction book that Hemingway ever wrote. Trust me, it took a while. And then I boiled it down to the most important steps that he talks about, from the beginning, to the middle, and then finally the end, in revision.
First, these are the three things that Hemingway says every writer needs. These are the basic things you need before you even start writing.
First, Hemingway says that you need a moral compass, a strong sense of justice and injustice. A writer without a sense of justice and injustice would be better off editing a school's yearbook than writing novels. Dude, sick burn against yearbook creators, Hemingway, but why did he say this? Because if you don't have a strong sense of justice and injustice, you're not going to be writing very strongly in favor of things, or be writing with a type of anger that fuels good prose against injustice. And this could be on the personal scale, the micro level, like someone does an injustice toward you, or also could be on the macro scale, talking about big political movements or injustice in the world at large. Hemingway said that what made Dostoevsky great was that he got unjustly sent to a Siberian concentration camp. Dostoevsky was just a member of a group that was considered subversive by the Russians, and all of a sudden, he got packed off to Siberia. But that sense of injustice powered all of his writing, and without it, we wouldn't have ended up with books like *Crime and Punishment* or *The Brothers Karamazov*.
Hemingway says that all writers need early trauma. In a letter to Fitzgerald, he said, "You have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously." Because the writer is someone who takes that injury and uses writing as a way to rectify the wrong fictionally, or as therapy to try to process that trauma. I mean, you've probably heard this saying that there are no writers with happy childhoods, and that's what Hemingway is getting at here.
Three, a crap detector. Hemingway said all great writers have this. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof crap detector." That's the PG version of the quote. What that detector does is it lets you know when what you're writing isn't up to snuff. It also tells you what is working in your manuscript and what isn't working, so you can revise better. That detector gives you objectivity, so you know what's true on the page, what's false on the page. And probably the most important thing that a detector does is it allows you to know where to revise and what you need to delete. If you are always in love with your own writing, it's probably a good sign that you haven't built up this detector.
Hemingway's second step in writing a book is to pick your subject, and he's gone ahead and identified the three main topics that a writer should write about.
The first subject he identified is war. "War is the best subject of all," he wrote. I mean, this makes sense with his history as an ambulance driver in World War I. He saw firsthand all the tragedy that goes into war, and so he knew that makes for good storytelling. He said that war gives you the maximum amount of material in the minimal amount of space. Now, for most of you, you're probably aren't writing about a war, but I think this advice still applies to you. What you are looking for in your fiction is life and death stakes. A war in your book means something that will kill your character, either literally or figuratively, if they don't accomplish what they're going for.
Hemingway's second subject is love. "Love is also a good subject," as you might have discovered. Remember, Fitzgerald wrote *The Great Gatsby*, so this is a man who knows about love stories. But Hemingway also knew about love. This is a man with four wives, and he madly fell in love with each one. Hemingway also frequently talked about how lovemaking informed his storytelling. Oh, you Casanova. But when you think about it, it is rare to find a book without some kind of romantic element. Love is foundational to storytelling, and nearly every book of Hemingway's had a romance. Think about *To Have and Have Not*, think about *A Farewell to Arms*, think about *The Sun Also Rises*. Really, everything. But *The Old Man and the Sea*? Your book should think about romantic love, absolutely yes, but you should also think about other types of love. Romances like friendship love, sibling love. I've been reading Michel Houellebecq, and most of his books are concerned with the love two brothers have for one another. Filial love, right? Love for parents. And don't forget love for pets either. You can have an extremely strong love for your pet, right? Roxy? Roxy, she's sleeping.
The third major subject that Hemingway identified was money. "Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poverty, and how many ways his books he's usually writing about people without money, people living hardscrabble lives, people just scraping by, like characters in *To Have and Have Not*. But an abundance of money can provide just as interesting a subject. Think of the massive wealth inside that limo in Don DeLillo's *Cosmopolis*, or the novel trilogy *Crazy Rich Asians*. Think of the absurdity of wealth in *Downton Abbey*, and then how that's contrasted with the lack of wealth down below. Or how jealousy for wealth is what drives murder in *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. Money divides characters and provides something for characters to strive for. And a lot of money allows the reader to live vicariously and have fun, because they get to experience what these rich characters are experiencing.
Okay, so now you have the foundational things that you need to be a writer. Now you have chosen your subject, and now it's time for step number three, the one way to start writing.
What advice does Hemingway give about starting the writing process? One time, Hemingway got stuck while writing a story in Paris. He couldn't figure it out. He had major writer's block. So he sat in front of a fire, he peeled an orange, and started throwing those peels in the fire. He looked out over the roofs of Paris and began to give himself a pep talk. He said, "Listen, you've always written before, and you're going to write again." And then he said this: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
So we took this impossibly big task of writing a novel and boiled it down to this very manageable step of writing a single sentence. One sentence, only one sentence. Anybody can write one sentence, right? But the question is, what is a true sentence? One, it's something without artifice or fakery. It's a relatively plain sentence. You're not trying to fool anybody with this sentence. Two, it's something that you know about. This is absolutely key, because the reader's going to know if you are pretending to have knowledge that you don't really have. And three, a true sentence is something that is just brimming with the vitality of life, stuff between characters, or the beauty of the natural world. Something that is celebrating life. Ultimately, Hemingway thought that if you can write one true sentence, then you can write a whole book. So you start with a cornerstone of that one true sentence and build from there. And if you want to learn more about this, there's actually a fantastic book called *One True Sentence: Writers and Readers on Hemingway's Art*. Basically, each essay talks about a single sentence of Hemingway, breaking it down and explaining why it's incredible.
Hemingway's fourth step in writing a book is the essential way to write characters. You really can't write a book about characters, and so it's not surprising that Hemingway ended up giving a lot of advice on how to create a good character. I've taken all that advice and tried to boil it down to the ones he repeated multiple times, and what I think is the most important advice that he gave.
One, no perfect characters. In a letter to John Dos Passos, he says, "Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters in." He actually says that this is the only mistake that can ruin a great piece of literature. Characters always need faults, so that the reader feels like they're believable. He said that when characters don't have any faults, they stop being people and they start to be something more like a symbol. And plus, perfect characters are kind of boring and also unrelatable. We put them up on this pedestal and we think, "Oh wow, they're so great," but it's very difficult for us to see ourselves in their struggles.
My second piece of advice about characters is, don't write characters. In *Death in the Afternoon*, he said, "When in writing a novel, a writer should create living people, people, not characters." I love that. If you try to set out to write a character, you're going to end up writing a character, meaning like a fake person in a book. His goal is always to write people. You are not trying to create a fake person, you are trying to create a real one. His real trick was how he made them come alive, and he identified three things. He said that you have to have knowledge of a person, you have to write about that person with your head, thinking very critically about their motivations and their psychology, and three, you have to write with your heart. What do you feel for this person?
And Hemingway's third step to writing about characters, I mean, people, is to base them on real people. Now, of all the advice that Hemingway gave on writing characters, this is actually the topic that he talked about most. He almost always based his characters on people that he knew. That's how he made them come alive. Sometimes he used the real names, but most of the time he gave them a fake name and then just based it on their personality. There's this huge advantage to using real people's inspiration for your character: is that you have to do less work to make them feel like they're coming alive. You have such a depth of knowledge that it's very easy to transfer that to your character. But I will say this strategy got Hemingway in trouble. One of the characters in *The Sun Also Rises* was based upon a real person, and this person confronted Hemingway and said, "Why did you make me cry so much in that book?" And Hemingway's response was hilarious. He said, "Well, you do cry an awful lot for a man. And if you have a problem with it, I'll box you." I mean, come on, you've got to admit that is the most Hemingway-esque answer ever. But after that point, he actually did feel bad about that, and so he didn't stop basing his characters on real people. But what he did is he tried to change them a little bit more, so the real people wouldn't be so offended.
Hemingway's fifth step in writing a book is to start observing details. So details weren't just details to Hemingway, they were foundational to how he conceived of making a book come alive. Here's what he says: "The problem is with most writers, most people never listen nor do they observe." He said that as a writer, if you don't practice very careful listening and observing, you're going to dry up. You're going to run out of material, 'cause you're not filling yourself with the wonderfulness that is in this world. And he also said that any writer, when they walk out of a room, they should remember the details of that room and what made them feel something in that room, and the details of the characters in that room.
In *Death in the Afternoon*, which is about bullfighting in Spain, he talks about a matador getting up after being gored by a bull. And I love the details here. He focuses on the dirtiness of his face, the dirtiness of his breeches, and the dirtiness of his underwear. But then the end of the sentence is noticing the unbearable cleanliness of the white thigh bone where the bull had gored him. I love the contrast between cleanliness and dirtiness, and the detail of noticing the color of the bone. Another great detail of Hemingway's is he has this scene in *A Farewell to Arms* where soldiers are being bombed while eating. And so this man gets up and runs with a whole hunk of cheese. And when he sits down again, thankfully alive, the bombs did not kill him, he notices the cheese is covered with brick dust. The bombs pulverized his brick and it covered his cheese with this reddish dust.
If you don't think that you're good at details yet, Hemingway suggests this exercise to help you get better. He says, "When you're in town, stand outside the theater and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. Notice the small things. Notice how their bodies move and unfold. Notice their pace. Notice their little gestures." If you're a careful observer, and that will train you to be a more careful observer in other parts of your life.
Anyway, sixth step to write a book is simplicity. The danger with this writing advice, and really the danger of all writing advice, is you take it all and you dump all this stuff into the book, and then it's just this huge mess. There's a dozen storylines, 100 characters, and the reader, honestly, can't make sense of any of it. And that's why this step is absolutely crucial. Hemingway was a master at simplicity. He took super complex ideas and characters and boiled it down to the neatest, sparsest of language. "This is the prose that I've been working for all my life, that should read easily and simply and seem short, and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world." I think it's important to note that simplicity does not mean simple. It means compacting complex meaning inside simple language. It's honestly a bit of trickery. All the complexities of the world can fit inside his very simple prose. I've heard about people talk that if you really understand a topic, you can explain it in such simple terms that a five-year-old could understand it. And Hemingway wrote *The Old Man and the Sea* in language that a five-year-old could understand. Once, Faulkner insulted Hemingway and he said, "He has never used a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." And Hemingway sent this zinger back: "Poor Faulkner, does he think that big emotions come from big words?" And here's the exercise for you: Take any newspaper article and try retyping it, focusing on the type of sentences that they're writing. That's going to teach you the type of sentence control and discipline with language that will lead to a Hemingway-esque style.
Hemingway's seventh tip to writing a book is write with your body, not with your mind. Hemingway hated authors that wrote with their mind, and he even identified some of these guys. He said, "Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier," they were all responsible. He meant this as like a supreme insult. And he said, "No one would ever think they had bodies, they had minds." Yes, nice, dry, clean minds. For Hemingway, good writing always came straight from the body. What does that mean? Well, one, it means writing with a full array of senses: sound, smell, taste, sight, touch. The way your body interacts with the world is all of these senses. So if you write focusing on those senses, you're really writing with a memory of what your body has experienced. Two, writing from the body means writing from your gut. Use your instinct, man. What do you feel is right in this story? And remember, Hemingway was always very anti-outline, and I think that's because outlines are more of a way of writing with your mind. For him, he wanted to go with sort of gut instinct, and so he just flowed with it. Another distinction is where you start the writing process. If you start with an idea and then create characters and plots to support that idea, that's very much writing with your mind. Writing with your body means you start in a particular place, with a particular person, doing a particular action. It is very scene-based, and it's very physical, rather than being cerebral.
All right, Hemingway has two more steps for us, and this one is extremely important. Number eight is leave things out. We're nearing the end of Hemingway's process for how to write a book, and this is the point where you realize not everything in the world can fit inside your book. It's only a book, it's not the history of the universe. As an editor, this is something that I'm constantly reminding my clients of, is like, "Listen, this chapter of yours, it's impeccably written, it's wonderful, I couldn't get enough of it, and guess what? It doesn't fit inside this book." For one reason or another, it doesn't connect strongly enough with the plot or with the theme. And even though it's fantastic writing, and I enjoyed reading it, for the sake of the book, you probably shouldn't include it. And if you have ever heard any piece of writing advice from Hemingway, this is probably it. It comes from this quote: "If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only 1/8 of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
So you've probably heard of Hemingway's famous iceberg advice, right? The little tiny bit of an iceberg above water is the words that are actually in your book. While below the water, invisible and not included in your book, are all the things you actually know about the book. And Hemingway really practiced this, right? He knows how marlins are made, but he left that out of his book. He talked about how once he saw 50 sperm whales all swimming together, and he harpooned one of them, but then he never included that in the book. The point of Hemingway's iceberg is that you have to know an enormous amount about your characters and about your topic. You have to be an absolute expert in the characters, the culture, the place. And after that point, then you can write the book, but you're not going to include all of that in the book. It would be very boring for the reader. Still, the stuff that you do include is going to be so packed with meaning that the reader is going to sense all the things that you didn't include and pay attention to that last line in the quote about the hollow spaces. If the writer doesn't truly know what he's doing, there's going to be hollow spaces. Like if you write about a welder and have never done welding, the reader is going to be able to tell. Your goal is to over-research, overwrite, and then leave most of it out. Now, here's the real trouble. You can't just write the 1/8 of the iceberg above the water. That's what we wish we could do. That would be the most efficient thing. But you can't do it that way. What you do is you write the entire iceberg, and then you delete most of it. You think I'm lying to you? But here's an example from Hemingway. For *To Have and Have Not*, he deleted 100,000 words from that novel. Guess what? The whole book is only 55,000 words. That means he wrote 155,000 words and deleted over 100,000 of them. He threw away more than he kept. So this whole iceberg idea isn't an abstract idea for Hemingway. This is something that he practiced.
All right, now it's time for our very last step in Hemingway's guide: how to revise. There's one step that Hemingway said is crucial for revision, and it's something you actually have to do before you start revising. Let it rest. In a letter to his publisher, Charles Scribner, he wrote, "Let me know how long I have to stay away from it before I can get it to you. Longer I can stay away, it will be better, as it gives me a whole new chance to see it cold and plug any gaps and amplify where there is any need." He knew that he couldn't just finish a book and then the next day jump into revising it. He knew that there needed to be a type of distance so he could see it with more objectivity. And when he wrote *A Farewell to Arms*, he was eager to revise it a month later, but instead, he said, "No, I'm going to wait until I move to Florida and I have a couple months under my belt, and then I'm going to return and revise it." And in *A Moveable Feast*, he said what might be his most famous quote about writing: "The only kind of writing is rewriting." And like all Hemingway advice on writing, this isn't something that he just thought abstractly. This was something he really practiced.
I want you to take a guess on how many times Hemingway rewrote the ending to *A Farewell to Arms*. Three endings? Seven endings? 15 endings? Or even more than that? So go ahead, make a guess in your head. How many times do you think he rewrote the ending? All right, you ready for the answer? 47 times. 47 distinctly different attempts to write the ending. Some of these endings were really close to being good, some of them were really terrible. Like this one: "And that is all there is to the story. Catherine died, and you will die, and I will die, and that is all I can promise you." Jeez, Hemingway, really? I think he was having a bad day. But here's your takeaway: If a Nobel Prize-winning author, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, can get it wrong 46 times before finally getting it right, I hope that gives you the courage to keep on revising.